Posts by Anonymous Cowherder

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What a load of joyless c***s.

Boaty McBoatface is a perfectly cromulent name. The narks rolling back from letting the people name the bloody thing preferring a "Panel of experts" do it instead is a nonsense. How does one become a boatnaming expert? I've named dogs, cats, rabbits, teams at work, cars and other inanimate objects as well as fantasy football teams, servers, networks, AD domains and all manner of other things, does this make me an expert?

You've opened the poll, live by the winning entry, who cares what the bloody thing is actually called? Vote freedom, vote McBoatface!

Get the alternate HTC releases, just like Microsoft.

I've owned the HTC Desire, One X and M8. Each of these have been the leading Android (If not all) phone at the time.

I skipped the M7 which was a humdinger and am waiting for the M10 before upgrading my M8. The M9 wasn't a bad phone, it was just that the M8 was so good that the leap to the M9 wasn't that noticeable. We reached a point a while ago that the rate of improvement in phones has slowed as the current crop of devices are pretty magnificent and only differentiated by tiny differences.

Mine's fine

Thank you el reg

Without intending to win the sycophant of the year award this early in the year (if indeed at all), it is rather scary to think that I have been reading your content for most of the time you have been churning it out so thank you.

You must be doing somethings right for myself and many many others to do so. I've lost count of the times you have been the source of useful information at work, discussions and actions leading out of emails containing a single blue line - a link to a reg article...

Thank you for being you </barf> Keep it up, keep up the text content and leave videos to youtube and, er, other sites. I would like to see a little more in-depthness across stories that warrant it and when you are going to make changes please adhere to the change process and give us good notification!

Is it too late for entries to Edinburgh's funniest joke?

Outsourcing, save money?

Ho ho ha ha ho ho ha ha ha hahahahahahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Reduced cost of ownership, return on investment..... I wouldn't say my sourcing partner is fat...... I haven't spoken to my sourcing partner for months, I don't like to interrupt the bills, the additional charges, the hidden costs....

I'm here all week, try the chicken in a basket, it's lovely but the basket was out of scope so it will be served with your pudding and you'll be charged twice.

Won't somebody think of the parents???

We need a Helen Lovejoy icon!

This is Daily Heil writ into policy. If parents don't want their kids seeing the videos then manage their device usage properly. Don't expect technology companies to police what is and isn't acceptable this is a function of parenting and your responsibility.

Sorely missed.

I loved the stuff that Channel 4 showed and digested as much as I could. I had the privilege of seeing him live in 92/93 at it was phenomenal. I would love to know what he thought of today's society and politicians.

Re: Send this e-mail and keep a copy.

I'm now at PHB level, the fact that you have put "companies" rather than "company's" undermines your attention to detail and raises the issue of whether I can trust your judgement on this matter. On this occasion I note your concern however I do also need to cut the budget and I'm now more convinced of this than before I read your email.

Love 'n hugs

PHB

P.S. I'm also looking at your use of "days", confirming my initial fears which are then compounded by the odd break in that line.

Even Yo! was insecure!

An app with a single purpose of sending 3 characters across the intertubes was fundamentally flawed. Granted there were dependencies such as contact lists... but bringing the kid into our IT fold the fact that we can't even get 3 characters from one device to another securely and safely shows the flaws in our industry.

If we built houses, roads or made food we would be worse than the charlatans currently doing those functions who are using our products and services.

This was one of the most accurate articles I've read on a tech website, or any website for a long time, real hitting nail on the head stuff. It was hardly rocket science either, just the big secret we all know and pretend to forget for our 7+ hours a day.

I had a smart meter fitted last week

And I am pretty happy with it. It shows our energy usage in £s and has actually, even in a relatively short time got my wife thinking about the energy we are using and that it costs money! Horrifically sexist comment but true, instead of my channelling my inner father and telling her to put a jumper on she did it herself last night.

Great success!

I started on Linux in 2007 in the good old days of GNOME2, coming from a windows background GNOME2 helped the migration on the desktop through things such as the panels that I had known and loved since Win95 brought them in.

The death of GNOME2 and transition to GNOME3 completely changed the way I worked and I jumped from Ubuntu and Fedora to Mint and haven't looked back since. Cinnamon was the reason I switched to Mint and the reason I have stayed, one of the nicest desktop environments I have used and to see the developments and level of stability it has achieved in such a short time warms my cockles.

I'm pleased that it is getting the love it deserves and the wider audience using it will hopefully continue its development and doing what it does best.

Re: I find BTWifi-with-FON annoying

BT Do this with my infinity router, I'm fine with it.

I've been doing this on my BT routers for years, not got a problem with it. I use the service when I'm out and about, it is usually easier to connect to similarly shared BT-Open or whatever it is called than to ask the person for their wifi password.

Ferchrisakes, if this is all the mom and daughter have to lose sleep about they are doing fine and dandy.

Been using this free service years. This is the first outage

As per title, I use the free service, I had the offline notice this morning but didn't think too much of it as still had access to stuff.

I've never given lastpass one penny yet their product has worked fine for me (as far as I can tell, they may be sending my credentials to bad people who are able to see all of my boring life play out for them too.)

This is the first outage I have ever had with lastpass, that isn't a bad strike rate as far as I am concerned. Once in several years. Things I have paid for have had much worse failure rates.

It doesn't like my northern English

I have siri on an iPad which I occasionally use in the kitchen to display recipes and play music whilst cooking. I have tried to use siri here as I can press the home button with a knuckle whilst I have all manner of chicken innards or other kitchen things on my hands and ask it to set timers or reminders with varying degrees of success.

If I try to use it for anything more complex it really struggles with my Mancunian accent which gets very frustrating and ends up with my just insulting siri, repeatedly.

Google now on the other hand is more than able to cope and understands me most if not all of the time. I'd much rather have a desktop google now (I'm a neckbeard so the latest google updates don't really work on my linux desktops.) than a desktop siri on my machines.

You can have my ipod when you get it from my cold dead fingers

I have a 120GB iPod Classic that was only replaced when it became too small, I replaced it with a 160GB iPod Classic.

I manage it through iTunes which is a bit of a pain and can't use flac but it does mean I have a large part of my digital music collection with me on the move, it plugs into my car nicely and lets me change tracks, playlsts, podcasts via the car's touchscreen.

If I connect my android phone via bluetooth I don't get quite the same functionality. Plus, I'm not a fan of cloud stored music, I have a 5GB 4G data package which I could use for this but would rather use that for other purposes.

It is for us the consumers to decide how we access the content we wish to access, not for consumer device designers to dictate how we do this. Just give me a massive amount of disc space in a portable device and let me worry about backing it up and syncing. The cloud works best for me as a storage space but for day to day use I use local copies.

So I'm not the only experiencing this?

I had a meeting with "the business" earlier this week. Several departments were there who had previously gone off and done their own thing but were now being hit by vendor lock-in, price rises, failure to stick to contracts... All the time we had been providing nuts and bolts IT services in house that kept chuggling along around 99% uptime.

The various business departments wanted to bring their IT needs back in house for IT to design, build and support. It was a very enjoyable meeting, means I'm going to be doing a lot more work soon but in this climate I was fist pumping all the way back to my desk.

As I see it

In the 90/00s we in IT were seen as a cost, an unnecessary budget burden and in many ways we were. We had poor products that didn't scale across very large organisations. Through as series of acquisitions and mergers many IT systems were brought under one roof and we had the whole "Legacy systems" issue and systems not talking to each other. One by one, bright sparks decided to "buy a new IT system" and various IT companies made a lot of money without delivering a system that the people who create revenue for the companies could actually use.

We were then seen as an even more expensive department that was delivering even less products. Along came the raft of outsourcing and the opportunity to listen to the salesmen and slash budgets, the link between business and IT was further broken.

Next we hit the massive growth in consumer IT, suddenly people not only expected corporate IT to work as well as their mini network at home did but also give them the same flexibility as their home network, despite home and corporate being two different beasts.

IT still have poor products to work with and on reduced budgets. Roll out 8000s machines, with different application portfolios, different access rights, hot desking, legacy systems, security, lack of management buy-in, dumb decisions, crazy policies.....

We are still delivering poor products as our goalposts change with each management whim, we want flexibility, security, availability, redundancy and we want it cheap. Now we're into cloud, BYOD and I want my iPad to print to that printer and use it as a full on workstation.

As IT we need to align with our users to deliver services that they need. When we are seen as delivering value we will stop being seen as a cost and barriers to change.

I'd like to be able to do this

I recently had a morning without water at home as the water company had to perform maintenance, they put a note through the door a week beforehand and as I was due to be at work on the day in question all was fine. At work however we regularly need to do work that would be done so much quicker if we were able to say "We need to turn everything off network wise for about 30 mins" - If we were able to do this without the panic setting in that a few hundred emails wouldn't be unreplied to for those 30 minutes we would be able to provide a better IT service in the longer term.

We've become a little too accustomed to 99.9999% uptime that when any unplanned outage occurs, even when they are on free services it becomes a catastrophe. When we try to schedule a planned outage it is like we are asking for something totally preposterous.

2 year contracts syndrome?

I've had a Desire and currently have the One X, both exceptional phones, my wife has had the same and between us we've had a sum total of zero problems in the last 3 years, (6 years if you count us twice).

For me the issue HTC had was the "too many models", the Desire was the top phone when we got ours but it was followed shortly by the Desire HD,Z and god knows what else, then came the Sensation... All the time our 2 year contracts on the Desire were chugging along and the phones were still working but missing out on some of the later android version goodness the newer phones had. As our contracts ran out the One X appeared, so I waited to renew the contracts until we could get the One X. By this time there was also the One S, followed shortly by the One XL and now just the One. In the meantime Jelly Bean appeared and it too a while to get to our "flagship" phones.

I'm still happy with my One X but it does grate that the world and its wife is fawning over the One and the One X appears to have been relegated to Wildfire status in terms of support. I'm a pretty big HTC fan but I will probably move us both to Samsung once these contracts are up which is a shame as I like Sense and am not too keen on Touchwiz.

HTC may have been better off tying their product release cycle to contract cycles, 24 months have been standard for contract phones for some time. Granted not everyone is on a contract but large numbers of people are, if HTC stuck a balance between contract cycles and android versions they could be sitting pretty. Plus as has already been mentioned blown a bit on marketing they may not be facing some of the issues they now have. They have splurged on Champions league advertising for the One but it would appear too little too late.

Re: No MACS to be seen here. Was: The police are as bad

The mac address is persistent on a device, the multiple IP addresses it or the router it attaches to are assigned are not persistent which is the point I was making to the police. Two xboxes may have at one time connected to the internet via the same IP address, both could later have been nicked, if the police wanted to use the IP address to identify them then it wouldn't work. If they could cross reference this against MAC addresses they might have a chance of identifying it.

There isn't an easy way of identifying a stolen device if the owner hadn't already taken down its serial number, imei number or scrawled "pRoperTy of Doug" in tippex on it. I was asked who they could identify them via IP, I tried to steer them in a way that may help.

Re: The police are as bad

I did mention this, along with NATing, private/public IP addresses.... which is why I was stressing to them that the MAC addresses, wireless & wired were better to use as an identifier than an IP address. An IP address on its own is meaningless.

The police are as bad

I was contacted by our local police force to assist with the identification of stolen equipment. One of their senior bods had heard that you could trace machines via IP address and wanted me to let them know how they could match up devices (PS3s, Xboxs and phones) with IPs so they could return them to the owner.

I told them that they each device would have a MAC address that was unique (I didn't go into spoofing) but that the IP would change depending upon which network it was connected to. They could cross reference the MAC address against information ISPs help about which MAC address had been assigned which IP address. The police were adamant that this wasn't the case and that the IP was the only piece of information they needed to identify the device.

I tried to explain that the laptop I was emailing them on was picking up xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx at work but it picked up yyy.yyy.yyy.yyy when I was at home and zzz.zzz.zzz.zzz when I was connected to a different network. I gave them a brief overview of DHCP and DNS and they were still fixated on IPs and IPs alone as the single identifying factor.

I advised them to contact their IT department to corroborate what I had told them and to get back to me if they wanted further clarification. They never got back to me.

Install cinnamon and upgrade

I've been running ubuntu on my main PCs for years, well since fedora jumped fully in with gnome3. When ubuntu made the leap away from gnome2 I struggled for a bit, dallied with XFCE and mint but as soon as cinnamon was available on 12.04 I've been back. (Had a strange dns issue on mint that I didn't have time to sort out).

Since then I've just needed to sudo apt-get dist-upgrade and away I've gone. There's been issues with networked printing and something else that escapes me now but I've not seen unity for years, haven't needed to.

I do wish they'd stop dicking about with useless stuff, get the platform unbelievably stable, get it to work with most mainstream hardware vendors, make sound and video work seamlessly, decent fast file system and a good portfolio of tools then work on hardening it so that it is the most secure OS.

Re: "Comfortable with the terminal"

I've got a windows background but run linux on my main work PC and have had a macbook for about a year. I use the command line on all operating systems, not because I need to but because I can. How do you find the IP address in windows? Run, cmd, ipconfig/all, on a mac I'd use the gui in preferences but could also do it on the cli.

Pointing and clicking is good, the command line is good too, there are times when one is better than the other and I like to think that I use the best tool for a task, much like I try to use the best OS for specific tasks.

Football's transfer deadline day

Good!

Another success for the public sector.

If everyone else jumped of the cliff it doesn't mean you should. There are some advantages to "the cloud" or "the effing cloud" but there are also some pretty large downsides. There are some massive downsides to keeping everything in house too but in some areas of the public sector the only way to keep the show on the road is to keep everything in house. For example some of the data and services provided need to be 100% confidential and records kept for x number of years, I'm sure there are private organisations with similar regulations too who have also hit this issue and possibly resolved it in the cloud and good luck to them, I've got an issue with this as well as maintaining the current flexibility of some of our systems.

As someone who works in public sector IT (in case you hadn't guessed) one of my problems is running a public sector environment on a public sector budget but delivering an enterprise environment with the flexibility of "the old days" without any buy in from upstairs or the users. An environment that has grown organically over 30 years into a bespoke living organism with interdependencies that will not die does not lend itself to compartmentalisation and hiving off to a 3rd party who can offer the same level of service as we currently do, cheaper than us and still make a profit.

I'm sure in time distributed computing will begin to make my life easier but at the moment the costs outweigh the benefits, until this changes I'd maintain my Grandpa Simpson stance:

Have you got a sec?

Or

"While you're here"

"This has been happening for a week" - Bit I need it fixing now as the deadline is almost up, I could have told you 4 days ago when you had time to fix it but it really is urgent now. I know you are dealing with someone else's "just" request but can you "just" do this one as well?"

I can't possibly remember 2 passwords

I know we are there to support our users, we provide a service, without you our jobs do not exist but part of the time we have to do things that may seem unreasonable to you but there is usually a good reason.

I like thunderbird

Been using it for over 5 years with multiple IMAP accounts and my old hotmail account, the integrated inbox makes sure I see email I need to and the filtering options means the mail lists I am on and the turgid crap work send me are put in their own nice little folders.

Search could be improved and the plain/html issue already discussed needs refining. I'm happy with lightning, it integrates well with my google calendar, tasks would be nice but I can cope with using wunderlist for those. Maybe if lightning was built into the core application we might get some better usability but I'm not sure what.

I would hate to see it go the way of many other pieces of software and dwindle away, we need a good thunderbird to provide an alternative to outlook and the microsoftification of email, outlook isn't the only fruit.

I hate fax machines

Always have done, always will do. They never used to work for me and usually resulted in many, many phone calls along the lines of:

"I' faxed that 2 hours ago, did you get it?"

"No, nothing"

"Ok, I'll send it again"

"No still not got it, oh hang on, its out of paper, I'll put some in (Cue sound of fax machine splurting back in to life) yeah, something's coming through now, oh, it is 7 copies of that document some one in legal needed yesterday but didn't get. Right, yours is coming through now, ha, it is the one you sent 2 hours ago, oh no, its out of paper again now, hang on, I'll have to nip and get some more....."

Later

"Can you resend it again, the one I've got printed out is very faint, yes, printing all those other faxes used up all the toner"

"No, still not got it, hang on, its out of paper..."

The guys who made Office Space got it right about fax machines, I fantasise about destroying them in the same way they do.

Other torrent sites area available

This block achieves nothing, if a person was inclined to torrent and are a bit lacking in skillz but had stumbled across piratebay they will see the blocked page, go to google and find other torrent sites.

If the person is a practiced evil downloader they will already be using multiple sources for getting their content and will not see the piratebay's blocked page.

Sky have shafted football and are doing so to cricket,

darts, tennis, rugby league and any other sport they get their grubby hands on.

The recent Manchester derby/title decider got a whopping 4 million viewers! Granted this probably doesn't count all those who saw it in the pub but one of the most eagerly anticipated games of recent time is stashed away on a niche channel?

Kids can't see most sports these days unless their parents pay the Murdoch tax, cricket's fan base is being eroded as you can't watch the coverage unless you agree to have sky.

Sky haven't made football worth millions, football was doing ok thank you very much before sky came along pumped the money into the top and let the lower leagues and grass roots of the game wither. Look at Italian football, they feasted on the tv money and when that dried up the game crumbled from the top down as well as the bottom up. Spanish football is enjoying the money now but it won't last forever.

Re: micro SIM

Yup, I ordered my One X over the phone then whilst waiting for it to be delivered I read about it needing a micro sim so I popped into a vodafone store and asked for one. I was handed a credit card sized piece of plastic and told to ring up vodafone when my fone arrived to activate the sim.

I've got a SD card in my desire

I put it in on the day I got the phone and it has stayed there, less than half full ever since.

I get my One X tomorrow and do not care there isn't a sd card slot, the largest sd card is nowhere near big enough for my needs, I have about 113GB of music that fits on my ipod classic, just. I like having all of this with me as I like choice and have varied music tastes, there isn't a phone on the market that comes close to this storage. Whenever I've wanted to transfer files I've either used dropbox or the old fashioned method of plugging the cable in and using it as a flash drive. I can't believe some people are keeping critical files on a mobile device and relying on sd cards as a backup, crazy?

As for battery life, I'm currently on my sofa, I've got my desire plugged in as we speak, at work I have another micro-usb cable to charge my phone there and I have a cigarette lighter adapter and 3rd cable in my car. My phone has run out of juice twice in its lifetime since May 2010 and they were both down to me pushing my luck. The reason for less than desirable battery life on these feature rich devices is due to the manufacturers using advances in battery technology to make devices thinner and lighter rather than offering increased battery.

The device we all want is probably 2 generations away, 250GB storage, large screen, 36hr+ heavy use battery life, reasonable size and customisable.

I hate "the cloud"

Thin clients proved popular didn't they? No? Lets rebrand it as "the cloud" and push the same nonsense but with a different veneer on it.

Don't get me wrong, I use my share of cloudy services but the majority of enterprises would suffer if they went "full cloud".

Same as virtualisation, again, I use more than my fair share of this wonderful technology but the bean counters have come up with a "75% of servers to be virtualised by xxxx" without any understanding of what this actually means or the possible impacts.

Keep "helping" these numpties BOFH & PFY, I need to live vicariously through you.

Progress, innit marvellous.

Please put it back!

Just think of the poor lambs on every helpdesk, "Click the start button, oh, win8, not there, ok, just hover the mouse of the hot corner in the bottom left." "Hot corner? Hot corner!" Says Joanne in accounts, "I haven't got a hot corner, I just need to launch another copy of Excel to get the costings..."